Success & Self-sabotage

Sarah Eckrich
Opinion Editor
seckrich@lhup.edu

I didn’t wake up one morning and suddenly feel like less of an operative Sarah. It’s more like I woke up one morning and started misreading and misdoing things.

For example, I would think that something someone said was supportive and kind, but it was actually sarcastic, mocking me right to my face. Or I’d think I aced a class project, when I really didn’t.

Suddenly everything that I thought and did was a miscalculation.

And I mean hey, we’ve all been there, right? I’m not the first person around this joint to have an off day?

But more than a few off days have passed now and the situation isn’t changing. I find myself consistently focusing on the wrong things and missing normal life cues.

You’ve experienced your cell phone losing reception and that feeling of being cut off and isolated. That’s been my life for the past few weeks. It feels like I’ve lost service. And I’m running in little circles trying to find a signal.

More relevantly, I think I know why I’ve suddenly become so seemingly separate and I’m willing to bet that I’m not the only person feeling this way or grappling with this particular problem.

With graduation looming large in the not so distant future, I find myself facing some tough choices. I’ve got to find the right job and a place to live and get a plan in place for the next phase of my life.

For five years now every decision I’ve made has been with one goal in mind: graduate. Now I’m about to accomplish that and I find myself floundering a little bit trying to answer those big questions about what comes next.

Without a clear and well-defined goal, taking life as it comes feels lazy. I’ve got a contingency plan, but its elements are missing that unifying theme, that one thing they’re all helping me work towards.

But as it turns out, that’s okay.

It’s been said that success is when preparedness meets opportunity. I’m plenty prepared, but I’ve been searching for opportunity. And in searching for opportunity, I’ve been trying to define it, which seems a little silly, trying to figure something out that hasn’t come along yet. I’m not a psychic after all.

A simpler way you could put it would be that maybe, just maybe, I’ve been trying too hard. And it’s caused me to be cut off from the life that’s happening around me.

They say if you want to make God laugh, you tell him your plans. If you want to make yourself laugh, look at all the plans you’ve had that haven’t panned out or have changed.

So I guess if you’re like me, we’ve got to learn to sit back and relax a little bit. At 24, I don’t have to have the rest of my life figured out. The future is still going to come and I’m not going to be any less ready for it for not having predicted or hand-selected every element of it.